Hands Over the City

The hands of criminals, from Lang's While the City Sleeps and Limosin's Young Yakuza. Both are also the first shots of "crime" we see in the films. In the Lang film, it comes during the opening scene, the hand of the killer unlocking the door so he can return later to commit a murder; in the Limosin, it's the first image we see apart from the title card and credits. And here's the difference between the two directors and the two films, and also the difference between evil and criminality: Lang's evil is an inscrutable menace, while Limosin's crime is ordinary, banal, just a yakuza gambling on his off time. The irony is that the evil, more dangerous, comes at a moment of passion, while ordinary criminality is a permanent condition. Lang's killer lives amongst us, while Limosin's yakuzas aren't even allowed into convenience stores.

About Novo

Novo is the best film Christophe Honoré has ever been involved with. Honoré only co-wrote the script, though like all of his scripts, it's not very good. But that's alright, because it's not a Christophe Honoré film -- it's a Jean-Pierre Limosin film. So much of a Jean-Pierre Limosin film that one of its first images is of a pair of hands: a man shaking a vending machine.

Eduardo Noriega plays a sort of comic David Mackenzie character, a grating amnesiac who finds himself in convoluted scenarios: the horny boss, the temp who needs help with her bra, etc., etc., etc. The temp becomes his girlfriend -- though of course he can't remember her -- and then there's the problem of his wife and son, whom he can't recognize but who watch him from a distance. All of this, plus cameos by André S. Labarthe and Yoko Ono's Bottoms.

But really, none of these people and their worries matter. Limosin is interested in activity at a more basic level. I admire him because he doesn't need characters. He can make movies about the inner lives of lips, feet, thighs, nipples, fingers, breasts, or shoulders. Those are his characters, and the people they're attached to are his plots. A person walking down the street for Limosin is, more often than not, about what the feet are doing and not the direction the person is going. Novo isn't about love, and certainly not about sex: it's about a hand over another hand, a hand on a hip, someone else's thumb on your chin. You get the sense that, if he didn't have to get funding to make his movies, Limosin would get rid of these goddamn scripts and just film hands for two hours.

Tokyo Eyes (1998) and Novo (2002)

Tokyo Eyes

All a film needs is a simple story and two good faces. In Tokyo Eyes (good title, too), the faces belong to Hinano Yoshikawa and Shinji Takeda. Yoshikawa's got great lips and eyebrows that can arch or level in a half-second. Takeda's a handsome slacker: pretty face, bad posture and a walk like Jean-Louis Barrault in Le Testament du Docteur Cordelier (or like Denis Lavant in Merde), but more pathetic than menacing. The simple story belongs to a film that was never made: Paris Eyes, the movie Jean-Pierre Limosin had originally planned. Then, on a whim, he decided to shoot it in Japan instead with a Japanese cast and a French crew. He even got Xavier Jamaux to do the music (Jamaux was doing acid jazz then, but he's since swapped acid for cocktails and does the music for Johnnie To and Wai Kai-Fai's movies)

Yoshikawa plays a teenager who begins following Takeda, who she believes is a notorious gunman called Four Eyes. Four Eyes has been going around shooting people, mostly single men, and Yoshikawa's detective brother has been assigned the case, which has consumed his life. When he falls asleep, he dreams that he's at the police station, still working. Limosin throws in Kafka gags, little jokes about A Woman is a Woman and Tokyo Decadence, even a poster for Irma Vep. Takeshi Kitano and Ren Osugi both show up, but this is to be expected -- Limosin directed the Cinéma, de notre temps episode on Kitano the next year, and he called it L'imprévisible (The Unpredictable).

Limosin's an interesting character himself. He's done a TV movie, a script by Christophe Honoré, documentaries. He did two more Cinéma, de notre temps episodes -- on Kiarostami and Alain Cavalier. You can almost imagine him as the sort of man who is fascinated by Kitano (whom he films like some sort of talking bird -- after getting used to Kitano's image in his own films, it's fascinating to see someone else filming him, trying to catch his strangeness), admires Kiarostami (the video games here are filmed with the same intelligence as Kiarostami's cars), but believes himself to be damned like Cavalier.

It's a little film, the sort of movie where the shape of a space doesn't matter half as much as the objects cluttering a shelf. No rooms, just windows and tables. No apartments, just couches and doors. No train cars, just handrails. Tokyo Hands, they should've called it, because it's the cinema of the hand more than the eye, the camera less concerned with what the eye catches than what the hand might be able to touch. Anything that exists outside of the possibility of being touched has no place in this film. If you see a ceiling, it's because it's too low (and even in the subway cars, the first thing we notice isn't the ceiling itself, but the hanging advertisements, just within reach). So we see newspapers, cigarette lighters, video arcade machines, shoulders, haircuts, handbags, guard rails, walls, cell phones, and, of course, guns and cameras. Of course, of course, of course. Most of Tokyo Eyes is shot with a handheld camera, which isn't that different from a gun, maybe a little bit heavier, but just as easy to use and only a little less dangerous.